Benchmarking Task Creation Performance in .NET 4.5 vs .NET 4.0

In this post, I will compare the Task creation performance in .NET 4 and .NET 4.5.

I will measure both time and memory consumption associated with Task creation:

public static Tuple<long, long> CreateTasks(int ntasks)
{
    Task[] tasks = new Task[ntasks];
    Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch();
    Action action = () => { };
    long startBytes = GC.GetTotalMemory(true);
    sw.Start();
    for (int i = 0; i < ntasks; i++) tasks[i] = new Task(action);
    sw.Stop();
    long endBytes = GC.GetTotalMemory(true);
    GC.KeepAlive(tasks);
    return Tuple.Create(sw.ElapsedMilliseconds,endBytes-startBytes);
}

The results on my test machine are as follows:

The benchmark results do indeed show the smaller footprint of a Task in .NET 4.5, in addition to the decreased amount of time that it takes to create Tasks.